Peak Soil and Sustainable Cheeseburgers

I read an article this morning from The Grist (full article here) called Peak Soil. The story centers around how our globe is losing its precious skin of healthy topsoil at alarming rates. They mention how Ethiopia loses nearly 2 billion tons of topsoil every year to erosion, and how the plowing and institution of industrial agriculture has ruined lands and people's lives for nearly one hundred years.

The brown color is made by the soil washing away downriver

The angle I found most interesting in this article was when the author turned the focus from loss of topsoil to herd-animal grazing. The author points out that there are very large herds of cattle, goats, sheep, and other grazers all over the world, and makes the claim that grazing those animals on our lands is destroying them. The article lists all kinds of statistics about how many sheep there are in China, etc... To those claims, I beg the question; 'why wasn't the globe facing mass desertification problems when there were herds of billions of large herbivores roaming the plains and savannas before man instituted practices of mass-extinction of wild herbivores and the domestication of what was left?'  Before the advent of agricultural management of herd animals, the hoards of herbivores that criss-crossed our lands vastly outnumber the pastured herds we now manage. Why, then, were these much larger herds not creating the same kind of devastation we see today? The answer is in the method.

When a large herd of grazers are penned up on a large parcel of land, each individual will actively seek out, in a lazy way, their favorite grasses, leaves, and plants. Usually there is enough land per animal (often around 2 acres per cow in the case of cattle) that the grazers can spread out and casually browse from the salad-bar selection. This means, first of all, that they don't eat the plants that aren't their favorite, which often leads to proliferation of troublesome weeds in pastures, and secondly, that the plants they do like aren't given the proper amount of time to recover between each visit from an herbivore, so they weaken and eventually die. When the plants die, there is less to hold together the soil, and come the next rainfall, away it goes.

Naturally, as you may have seen in NOVA documentaries or in the Planet Earth movie, given their natural habitat, large herds of grazers move in tight packs over large areas of land. In these dense clusters, they are constantly on the move (think of the baby caribou that is keeping pace with the whole herd only minutes after being born) because they are always being followed by predators. What this means for the ground they cover is that every plant gets nibbled down, the top layer of earth is churned up from all the hoofing and trampling, and the whole area is fertilized and irrigated by the herbivores. The plants then have ample time to recover before they are bitten again.

A suffering ranch in Zimbabwe, 2004

This natural pattern of grazing was the inspiration to Allan Savory (www.SavoryInstitute.com), a South African pioneer in regenerative agriculture practices. He asked himself, 'why can't we mimic the natural movements of grazers in our own pastures?' This question led to the development of what is know as Holistic Planned Grazing techniques, which replicate the effects of large herds moving in their natural pattern.

2005 - One nasty drought, one year of Holistic Grazing

He has tried and trued his practice over many years, and this one ranch in Zimbabwe is only one example. Simply by changing the way that we manage our herd animals, we can actually increase the health of soils, increase the living ground cover (plants), and drastically reduce the erosion rates. These images, taken over 4 years, clearly show what kind of impact the appropriate management of herd animals can have. The site where the photos were taken transformed from a near-desert into a lush grassland, with no input other than cows.

2006 - after a decent rainy season

2007 - after a major drought

 It is clear in the pictures how profoundly this land changes, even during years that experienced severe droughts, this ranch continued to improve its soil, cover the bare earth, produce healthier, happier, heavier cows, and mitigate whatever erosion might have been occurring down to nearly nothing.

It seems only fair that articles like this one from Grist would point the finger at herd-animals for committing these atrocities. On the surface of the issue, it seems that the animals are indeed overgrazing, and thereby destroying our precious lands. However, once we look a little closer, we can see that the animals are only doing what they do best, and actually, the methodology employed by the people who graze them is what is truly detrimental to our planet.

We can stop erosion and still feed the world! There are answers out there!

Nature had it all figured out. A planet in ecological balance for thousands of years... then we came along and thought we could do better... (hubris much?) We have dealt with the consequences of that choice for long enough, and now we are able to see the ways in which Nature really did have the right idea. We can emulate those natural patterns to our gain! We could swim upriver against Nature as much as we want, but we certainly won't cover as much ground if we work with the flow of the water...

May we all get the opportunity to eat meat that helped to halt desertification, erosion, climate change, and pollution!

Cheeseburgers that heal the world!!

Beets and Berries, Connecting the dots

There have been two news items recently that caught my eye. The first was about a decision by a federal judge to undo the approval of GMO sugar beets (hooray!) linked here. This decision sent the sugar-beet industry into an uproar with a lot of farmers concerned with how they would be able to meet their needs without roundup ready beets.

The second piece of news that grabbed my attention has been the release of a study conducted mostly by scientists from Washington State (Pullman) University, as well as members from Utah State, U of Oklahoma, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (full text here). The study compared conventionally grown to organically grown strawberries from 13 different farms. What they found is that "the organic strawberry farms produced higher quality fruit." The organic strawberries have a longer shelf-life, higher concentrations of many nutrients including antioxidants and vitamin C, and that they showed through their taste-tests that the organic berries were generally sweeter.

Wait, so the organic strawberries were sweeter? And the beet growers are thowing a hissy-fit because they can't grow their sugar beets conventionally? Has anyone else noticed this connection? Also worth noting is that the farms in the study didn't manage the microbial communities in their soils, so each trial was still a bit of a crapshoot (each farm could have started out with very different microbes, which will grow very different plants). I dare to suggest that had the organic trials incorporated a more thorough microbiological management, they would have seen results much more pronounced than what they found.

Determining the BRIX level for a fruit or veggie is a way of quantifying it's sugar content. According to John Evans of BounTea, a competitor/cooperator (coopetitor?) organization to my own BioLogic Systems, a normal grocery store carries veggies with a BRIX score of between 6 and 10. My guess is that typical organic would test right in between, probably at 10-15 or so. A vegetable given all it needs by the addition of billions of microbiological workers (i.e. good compost/compost tea) in the soil will regularly have BRIX levels of up to 20!

Hello beet farmers of the world! You can do it without roundup, grow beets with more sugar, do it for less money, with less dependence on certain multinational gene-manipulating corporate juggernauts! Doesn't that sound appealing!?

So yes, to recognize any arguments that might stem from this study, they did report lower levels of nutrients like potassium and phosphorous, but considering that their method of fertilization is to dump excessive amounts of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous (NPK) on the plants, that news comes as not much of a surprise. Yes, the organic crops also had lower yields by up to 25%. I believe that these places where the organic crops came in second can be explained by means of what microbes were present in each of these farms. What I found to be a bit of a pity is the way the study examined the microbiology.

Imagine billions of these guys working for your plants to provide them with all they need to thrive!

It seems as though the study simply mashed up all the microbes together and then weighed them to determine the total microbial biomass. What we miss by doing that is knowing what the diversity is like, what communities were present, what the relative populations are of specific organisms, which has a huge impact on the plant. They missed out on a great opportunity to really show that organic is more viable than conventional because they failed to properly account for the microbes. Guys, just because their little doesn't mean they don't matter! 

So here's my appeal to the university scientists. Now that we have this data, great! Job well done! Now lets go ahead and do another study comparing conventional, organic, and biologically managed veg. It is my belief that this proposed trial will leave no room for question. The biologic plot will, as it constantly does in undocumented trials, perform at least to the yield standard of the conventional, with all the added benefits from the organic. Who's up for it? Takers?